Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

What Zuckerberg is trying to tell is “TRUST“. But the way things are shaping up, I feel the uproar is yet to subside soon enough. If you pull over your attention to twitter and what people are talking about this new measure from Facebook, then you will get to know that users have not taken this move in the appropriate spirit and rightfully so! Even I was pissed off when I saw this breaking news yesterday morning. But this is not the first time, Facebook is in the limelight (all for the wrong reasons though); few years back their Beacon service (a new way of online advertising) came under much protest too from users.

And regarding the question of keeping the data, I ask if I regret uploading a specific video or picture and want to delete it, then why can’t I do it permanently? Do you guys own that data too! But as it turns out from the official release, it’s complicated! And they should have mailed users about their updated terms of service to provide more cushioning for themselves since in the present context users are totally hapless to think the ways blogosphere has responded to it. Instead Facebook should have released a official confirmation about the same and made it easier for users to understand the new TOS.

To conclude I still feel that such privacy issues have just started cropping up and we are going to see more of this from not only social networks but also other networks where users spend time by giving away personal information.